The Parenting Sweet Spot

Our kids are six- and nine-years-old, and things feel like they run fairly smoothly around here now. That’s not to say that we don’t have our moments, because, ohh, yeah we sure do. (Let’s not discuss Easter morning, ok?) But it’s not like when the kids were younger and it felt like we were just barely making it from one stage to the next.

As newborns, I’d watch them sleep, petrified they’d somehow stop breathing if I wasn’t vigilant.
When they first started solids, I stressed constantly about choking.
When our son was born, he had terrible allergies, so finding a way to breastfeed him without upsetting his system was hard.
Remember teething? Ugh, brutal.
When our son first started eating, he was riddled with food allergies, so reactions were common (and scary!).
When they started to crawl, we worried about them tumbling down stairs.
When they started walking, we worried about falls.
We had the terrible twos.
We had the thundering threes.
We had the f$*%ing fours.
We spent years wondering if they (or we) would ever sleep alone.
We worried about electrical sockets and stairs, and riding bikes, and going to nursery school.
I fretted over first days of school.
We worried about them making friends.
My heart was broken when our son cried for three months during every single school drop off.
We worried when they transitioned to French immersion.

It just felt like one worry after another, but somehow now, we’ve found some calm.

Just ahead of us, I see friends worrying about their kids dating, and going to parties. They’re fretting over their newly-minted drivers taking cars out alone. There are fears of their kids doing drugs and drinking. They have to worry about their kids doing well enough in high school to go to college and university and then finding jobs after university — you think this parenting gig gets easier, but the thing is, it really just changes.

Just like our children.

I don’t know what our next phase will be, but for now, I’m going to sit back and really enjoy this parenting sweet spot.